Every time I hear someone say something along the lines of, “I don’t believe in labels, you can’t label me, and I don’t label anyone else” I gleefully label them in their easy to identify bin with the rest of the ‘too naive to think that they can’t be labeled’ crowd. Yes, we’re all unique little snowflakes, but there is also a lot about us that is pretty predictable. How do you think insurance works?
In the chapter “What Users Do” from Designing Interfaces, the authors frame the topic of designing UI in light of the predictability of human nature. Particularly we see this described in the section titled “The Patterns.”
Boiling down human behavior and smearing it over a web page is actually pretty interesting (and rather violent sounding). The beauty is that a well designed site doesn’t draw attention to my habits, expectations, or patterns. Instead it uses them without my knowing, bringing forward the content first and foremost because the site has not asked me to learn anything new to access it.
Particularly the section “Changes in Midstream,” the ability to easily redirect my actions and goals in a given website without feeling like I have to start from scratch is a hallmark to good design. A good example of this is Amazon.com (and really any site that has strong recommendation algorithms) where a suggested product might educate me that my initial search was close, but here might be a better option. This satisfies other patterns in that I was able to “safely explore” and not stumble in to a dead end, and scratch that “instant gratification” itch even though my primary search result wasn’t exactly what I needed.
To my more youthful, idealistic classmates, be thankful you (and I) are so predictable; that means people can make websites that don’t tick us off when we use them.
